Kodak Professional 9810

Digital Photo PrinterLaunched at PMA in February of 2005, the 9810 follows its well-received little brother, the Kodak 1400. This is the big brother in every way, it is bigger, heavier, very much faster; it is fed by an enormous roll of paper that will spit out 300 10x8 prints at 45 seconds a go – that’s 3 ¾ hours of printing.

Physical

The printer is 17.4” wide, 13” high and 19” deep. It weighs 40lbs. It is packed in an impressively large box, which would double up as a transport case with a little care. The interior box dividers are foam rather than polystyrene so they should last a bit longer. It is not an easy lift, although your vertically challenged editor did manage to get it on to the bench unaided. A point worthy of mention is that you must remove the paper before transportation – it is quite a weight when it is unused and can damage the internals if left there during transportation.

The paper was easy to load; you push home the utility end caps and simply slide the spigots down the grooves to either side. The paper is then pushed through the roller system until it appears at the front, and the roller-locking mechanism is then closed down again to secure it. You then fit the ribbon into place (with the striped roller in the front bay) before releasing the wrapping on the roll and take-up spool. The whole process could be done in about 20 seconds from start to finish.

The printer requires a standard 240-volt kettle plug and is connected via a USB 2 or USB 1.1 cable to a PC, running Win 2000 or XP – there are no facilities for Macintosh computers.

Software Installation

This was trivial, you double click the calibration installer exe file, then the printer driver exe file and the job is done. The interface is very simple compared to an ink-jet as there is only a single media type to worry over. You have the usual array of choices in terms of managing your colour through Photoshop and these are discussed later. There is a package facility, which is described later.

On Test

With everything loaded we turned the printer on. After a couple of minutes initialisation (presumably to transfer calibration data and the like) the ‘ready’ light flashed and the first print shot out in the claimed 45 seconds – it really was that simple.

Then the serious work to discover the best method of handling the colour management began. The options were to use the Auto facility, use the icc profile installed with the printer, make and use a bespoke profile or, finally, to go for the really simple option and allow the printer colour management to handle things.

Auto Setting

This was run from Photoshop CS with the ICM disabled in the Advanced Dialogue and the Photoshop profile set to “Same as Source”. The results were a bit grim both with and without the ICM enabled. The colour audit “signature” was very similar to that obtained with the Kodak 1400 under the same conditions – poor greens, generalised desaturation and skin tones biased towards yellow. This is not the way to use this printer!

Colour Managed -

Kodak profile A profile is installed by the set-up.exe file, which comes with the printer. The profile is called Kodak 9810 Printer Glossy.icm. This was used like any regular profile from within Photoshop, via the Print with Preview menu and with this profile selected for output using Perceptual rendering intent and with Black Point Compensation turned on. This improved the greens significantly over the attempt described abov,e as well as improving the flesh tone accuracy and the overall error across the Macbeth chart colours. The greyscale linearity was however poor and it dropped away precipitously below 20% brightness values. The greys were biased about 2 ½ points too yellow, a detectable error to the eye. Overall the bulk of the error was in the saturation.

Colour Managed -

Bespoke profile We built a bespoke profile using Monaco profiler using a relatively small target of 343 swatches. In use this improved the error but still left us with desaturated skin tones with a yellow bias. The grey scale linearity was improved.

Question –

sRGB or Adobe RGB? We were specifically recommended to use sRGB rather than Adobe RGB and followed that advice up to this point in the testing. Curious as to why we were so desaturated we experimented with two ways of handling the RGB profile, assigning and converting. Staying with Adobe RGB produced a startling improvement in the colour rendition. This is not a test to determine if sRGB is better than Adobe RGB or vice versa, it is more a case of staying with the correct profile. Our audit target is made to ARGB and should be used that way. There was no discernable difference between using either profile under the correct conditions and so the advice to stay with sRGB is firmly rejected! This chimes with the advice given on the Kodak website which states, “Generally you should use the embedded profile” – the diagram actually shows ARGB.

Letting The Printer Management take over This method also worked well and is obviously the recommended route for those who do not have facilities to bespoke-profile their printers. While it was a little behind the bespoke profile used with ARGB, the difference was minimal. Indeed the high chroma colours were actually rendered more accurately than with a bespoke profile.

Metamerism, Base White and Dmax The base media is within a fraction of a Lab point of neutral, just tinting towards green (although the eye would not detect the bias). It is moderately glossy with no evidence of any OBA activity and has a thickness of 22 microns. Metamerism at 50% grey was very low indeed at 0.4 Lab points – D65 to Tungsten. One thing we did notice was that the greys look quite pink in low-energy bulb light, so don’t panic if you notice it as well, there’s nothing you can do about it. The printer surface was seemingly impervious to moisture after the XTRALIFE™ laminate was applied (automatically from the ribbon) and even very determined rubbing, with a moistened finger, failed to have any effect whatsoever. The maximum black had a Dmax of 2.07.

Kodak diagram 3

Packaging

There is a utility within the driver software to print a variety of multi-image packages. There are 16 of them by default ranging from 2”x2” up to 11” panoramas. You can also write your own, using a simple text editor such as Note Pad and saving the files with a .kpg extension. Detailed instructions come with the manual

Conclusions

As a high-speed workhorse this machine is going to take some beating. With either a bespoke profile or using Printer Colour Management, the colour accuracy is very good indeed, well up to the top professional standards of even the most discerning user. The printer is listed at £1979 from DPS (see advert this issue) and a media pack costs £289 ex VAT which works out at £1.13 per 10x8 including VAT. Given that there is going to be so little waste you should be able to make a tremendous margin at event photography and the speed means you are unlikely to lose any sales due to not keeping up with demand. If you can’t make money out of this set-up go back to collecting train numbers!

The SWPP 2009 Convention was an outstanding success,
we have 194 days to get ready for the 2010 convention - which starts on January 14, 2010

Photo Quote: If a day goes by without my doing something related to photography, it's as though I've neglected something essential to my existence, as though I had forgotten to wake up. - Richard Avedon